Family estrangement isn't as rare or one-sided as is often believed
Recently, I reposted an article I'd written about estrangement—or “No Contact” as it’s informally called on Facebook—and got pushback from mothers who were estranged from their adult children and who did not initiate the cut-off.
The reality is that these mothers—who claim to be abandoned by ungrateful, impetuous, and difficult adult children, who never informed them of either their complaints or their plans—are more likely to get a fair hearing by our culture, to get sympathy and support when they wage war against the so-called ungrateful adult child, and to be embraced by their communities for their actions.
But are we getting the whole picture on why we’re so quick to judge the adult child? Why do we, as the study by Ritenour and others found, revert to stereotypes calling the adult child “childish, immature, and ungrateful” for initiating estrangement?Here are some pieces of the puzzle revealed by research that are worth considering when we talk about familial estrangement.
As someone who was estranged from her one surviving parent on and off and then finally, I can tell you from experience that given the cultural onus, few people come forth and speak out. So, the truth is that for every incident of adult child estrangement you hear about, there’s probably one or two that is kept under wraps. That’s not a scientific statement but an educated guess, which happens to be bolstered by the following research study.
A personal opinion: While it’s useful to see these different distancing processes, it seems as though parent-child alienation is the odd man out, even though it might ultimately be the basis for a continued adult child-parent estrangement later, since it is a function of an adult’s deliberate and tactical effort to disrupt the other parent’s connection to the child.
While parents tended to focus on their children’s objectionable relationships or sense of entitlement, adult children honed in on toxic treatment or feeling unloved and unaccepted. Interestingly, while the adult children were able to be explicit about why they felt unloved or unsupported and connected those feelings to their parents’ behaviors, the parents showed very little self-reflection.
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